Building your Brain Advantage
Conventional wisdom tells us that good leaders are
- rational thinkers
- objective decision makers
- effective multitaskers
- attentive listeners and observers
Science tells us otherwise. In reality, we're not as good at thinking as we think. To quote one person, "our brains have a mind of their own". Often that "mind" is working at odds with what we are trying to accomplish.
Building Your Brain Advantage is about recognizing, understanding, and managing the disparity between how we think and how we think we think. Leaders who build this awareness become better decision makers, better change agents, and better relationship builders.
But it's not easy. Leading with the Brain Advantage requires an understanding of how the brain works, critical self-assessment, and feedback. Using our book, The Brain Advantage, as a launch pad, we can help you become a more effective business leader.
Joanne was a sales manager. She dreaded the annual goal-setting meeting with her sales reps. The meetings would often degrade into knock-down, drag out fights over the coming year's sales goals. She had a difficult time getting her sales reps to accept more aggressive targets although she knew that the company was dramatically losing market share.
Joanne didn't understand that she was the cause of the sales reps' resistance. Joanne would start each meeting by reviewing the prior year's sales. Without realizing it, Joanne was 'anchoring' the sales reps. Anchoring is when our brains latch on to a number and use it as a baseline against which to make decisions. Typically, once a person anchors, they are reluctant to move too far off the original number. The sales reps used the prior year's sales as their anchor and were reluctant to accept new targets that were much higher.
Once she understood the idea of anchoring, Joanne changed the structure of the meetings. She'd look at external benchmarks, corporate projections, or other models that suggested a more realistic (and often much higher) sales target. She'd start the meeting with that data. Then she would present the prior year's sales in comparison to that higher number. Of course, the reps rarely accepted the higher number outright. However, the target they did accept was often much closer to initial one that Joanne presented than it was to the prior year's sales.
Brad customizes and tailors all of his training courses to incorporate content, issues, and examples that are unique to your organization.
In addition to his standard courses (listed below), he can create custom training experiences adapted to your unique needs.
Standard courses (click for more detail):
Brad provides executive coaching to help you become more effective at managing the disparity between your conscious and unconscious thinking. He works with you in the context of your day-to-day problems and activities. Brad will help you improve the quality of your decisions, relationships, and actions
The following articles, from Brad's blog, provide additional content on Building your Brain Advantage
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